Makeover: Writing the Body into the Posthuman Technoscape: Part Two: Corporeal Axiomatics

Abstract

posthuman is getting under our skin, and they offered ways of resisting interpretations of a posthuman future that depend on the notion that information is disembodied. Our discussions have attended to the distinction between practices of inscription and practices of incorporation. By “inscription practices” we mean the range of discourses and rhetorics of persuasion from computer science, biotechnology, robotics and nanotech, media studies, art, film, video games, science fiction, literary studies, philosophy, and advertising—all the things we say and write, the representations we construct; in short, the codes we circulate about information and its relation to bodies. By “practices of incorporation” we mean the norms, behaviors, skills, and schemas of physical enaction that modulate the embodiment of these culturally constructed inscriptions and the performances of actual bodies—insofar as it is possible—in terms of them. In this dynamic of material/semiotic agents, resistances of material bodies produce fissures in the various strata; feedback between these processes generates new lines of flight. But how literally are we to understand the processes of inscription? Discussions of hybrid human-machine interactions have tended to see the material, machinic components on the other side of the cyborg interface as “enhancements,” extensions, or reconfigurations of the senses; the machine extends anthropomorphically, rather than fundamentally remaking the human. By contrast, the recent developments in cellular robotics that we described may